ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the matrix in which Jacques Lacan formalizes the relations between four positions he distinguishes in the discourse of the Other as discourse of the master. The four elements indicate four features of the same individual subject: his enunciation of discourse, his identification with the master-signifier, his alienation in language, and his deprivation by discourse. The chapter indicates simultaneously the occupants of these positions in a discourse which is considered by Lacan not only as the framework for politics and society but as the fundamental discursive unconscious configuration that precedes and underlies any other kind of discourse. In the discourse of the master, the position of truth is occupied by the real subject, the proletarianized subject, who is reduced by language to Lacan's enunciating workforce. The identity and the identitary conviction are both determined by the signifier, by discourse, specifically by the supposed 'univocal' attribute of the 'discourse of the master'.
